Amanda Knox: The Too-Steep Climb to Righting Wrongful Convictions

Chris and I got married on February 29th, 2020—just in
time, it seems. Only two of our guests cancelled at the last minute for fear of
travel due to the coronavirus. This was before Governor Inslee called for the
cancellation of any event with over fifty participants. Now, just two weeks
later, Chris and I are grateful that we’ve only had to cancel our honeymoon. We
were planning on travelling to Germany to visit Jens Soering who, after 33
years wrongfully imprisoned, has reentered the world at a very strange time. We
were hoping to write about meeting him in person for the first time, after
months of conversations through the prison phone system. In lieu of that, from
the safety of our home quarantine here in Seattle, I’m reflecting on the moment
we learned Jens would be freed.

You never know when the call will come. As it happened, the sun
had yet to crest the mountains to the east as the door of the gym jingled shut
behind me. I was tired, not at all ready for the elliptical, when my phone
rang: a call from my friend, Jason Flom. He said three words, “He’s getting
out!” and my heart began racing. “Jens? Do we know for sure?” I was already
crying. “Do his lawyers know? How soon? We have to go see him!”

Jens Soering, a German student living in Virginia, was convicted
of the double-homicide of Derek and Nancy Haysom in 1986. For thirty-three long
years—longer than I’ve been alive—he pleaded his innocence, losing appeal after
appeal, being denied parole fourteen times. I only became aware of his plight
last year, when I devoted a season of my podcast, The Truth About True Crime,
to his story. There were so many strange parallels between our cases, I started
to see Jens as the version of myself who never got out.

You’d think after four years locked in a cell, I’d want to keep
prison as far from my mind as possible. And yet I regularly get mail from
correctional facilities; I accept phone calls from inmates. This is what
happens when you become an advocate for the wrongly convicted. It’s something
my friend Jason has known for decades—he’s a founding board member of the
Innocence Project. He also hosts his own podcast, Wrongful Conviction,
where he, too, has delved into the injustice of Jens Soering’s imprisonment.

And we aren’t alone. Angela Merkel brought his case up with
President Obama. Irwin Cotler, former Canadian Minister of Justice, lent his
support, as has Walter Sullivan, bishop emeritus of the Catholic Diocese of
Richmond. There’s also John Grisham, Martin Sheen, and law enforcement
professionals like Chip Harding, Richard Hudson, and Andy Griffiths. And yet,
with all these voices raising awareness, for decades, Jens rotted in Buckingham
Correctional.

DNA science was in its infancy when Jens was on trial in 1990, and
it was not allowed in court, but they were able to test blood type. Jens has
type O blood, and there was type O blood found at the crime scene. Lead
prosecutor Jim Updike drew the jury’s attention to that type-O blood twenty-six
times, each reference another nail in his eventual conviction. Only a few years
later, DNA testing was routine, but Jens had to fight until 2016 to get that
type-O blood tested. And guess what…it excluded him, and indicated the
presence of two unknown males. Two independent DNA tests confirmed these
results in 2017. But that didn’t magically spirit Jens from his cell. He was
not exonerated. He was not granted a new trial. His appeals had been exhausted,
and Bedford County authorities just didn’t care. A pardon petition seemed to be
his last hope.

This is the hard truth: It takes more than DNA to free the
innocent. It takes political will and courage. And for Jens, that political
will was severely endangered by a medical school yearbook photo. His pardon
petition to Governor Ralph Northam was a longshot to begin with, but this was
made even worse by the blackface scandal that engulfed Northam’s
administration. While facing such scrutiny, the chances that Northam would
grant Jens a pardon effectively vanished.

Jens was not a “perfect” victim. He had, after all (like the
Central Park Five, like so many wrongfully convicted people) confessed to the
crime. But the evidence for Jens’s innocence and the strength of his advocacy
continued to mount, to the point that it couldn’t be ignored, even by the
politically embattled governor of Virginia. Finally, on November 25th,
Northam announced that Jens had been paroled on the condition that he would be
immediately deported to Germany and barred from entering the U.S. ever
again.

This parole is bittersweet. Jens has finally gained his freedom,
but not the restoration of his reputation. I know exactly what that’s like.
Even a definitive acquittal, like mine, doesn’t guarantee that people will
believe in your innocence. I also know what Jens will be facing as he walks out
of the airport in his home country and smells the air of Germany for the first
time in three decades, as he makes the obligatory statement to the journalists,
as he maneuvers to escape the paparazzi. He’s entering the world of freedom,
and it will be as bewildering as prison was to his 18-year-old self. And he’s
doing so while still carrying the burden of a murder conviction.

This is the first time I’ve become so personally invested in one
innocent man’s case. And it nearly broke me. Jason has been on this road time
and again. He’s been deeply, personally involved in dozens of exonerations.
He’s also been there, on the other side of the glass, for the many more who
didn’t get a happy ending.

What haunts me is, what would have happened to Jens if Jason and I
and the myriad other people who advocated on his behalf hadn’t taken the time?
Would Jens have died in prison? If it takes all the skill and tenacity of DNA
scientists, false confession experts, investigative journalists, novelists,
podcasters, heads of state, and teams of lawyers offering thousands of hours of
pro-bono work, just to get one innocent man paroled—not even exonerated—what
hope is there for the innocent people—disproportionately people of color—whose
cases go unnoticed, just another notch on a prosecutor’s conviction record?

A week after I learned that Jens had been granted parole, my phone
rang again. I was in the baking aisle of the grocery store. A call from an
inmate in Virginia. I dropped my shopping list and answered. The first thing
Jens told me: This is the last time I’ll ever call you from a prison phone. I could hear the muted enthusiasm in his voice, the unwillingness to really
believe it was true until he had actually left those prison walls. He had so
many questions. And he looked to me—a woman twenty years his junior—for
advice.

Jason calls me his little sister and, occasionally, his spirit
animal. It’s because I’ve thrown myself into the trenches, right alongside him,
trying to raise awareness of the flaws in our criminal justice system and help
free innocent people from prison—a task which is so much harder than it should
be. Jens calls me his big sister. Because I’ve been through the circus he’s
about to enter, and he needs all the help he can get adjusting to freedom after
thirty-three years, seven months, and four days unjustly incarcerated. I’m just
honored to have followed in the footsteps of devoted advocates like Jason, and
contributed even a little to the drive to get Jens out of prison. I’m honored
to have received his call.

And as the relief and joy of this much-too-rare, life-changing
moment washed over me, I had to step back into my daily life and my seemingly
endless routines. Back to the gym to climb a virtual mountain on the elliptical
machine—an activity that I took for granted until very recently, when all of
society was forced into quarantine by the coronavirus. We’re now panicking
about how to flatten the curve of this rising mountain of infection. It’s a
challenge I hope we’re up to. But on the other side of this crisis, the
mountains that stand between people like Jens and their freedom will still be
there as we all head back to the gym. It makes me wonder about the
search-and-rescue missions necessary for saving them peopled mostly by
volunteers like Jason, and what it would take to level that mountain off even a
little, so the heights we have to climb to save a single innocent person aren’t
so steep.